Special Report: Collaboration Across the Enterprise

Accessing knowledge can advance collaboration and productivity, or it can hinder it if the required information is too difficult to access. Whether it’s a sales person who needs access to a deliverable from marketing, or a coworker requesting information from another coworker inside an enterprise collaboration app, information needs to be readily available and accessible to knowledge workers in order for them to do their jobs. Collaboration requires information – it is about sharing new and or required information and ideas with another person. Across the enterprise, new technologies in Collaboration, Social Software, and Sales Communications are emerging that are enabling people to quickly share and access knowledge, allowing them to quickly achieve their desired business outcomes.

Collaboration Requires Presence – Especially for Remote Workers

All real-time, collaborative interactions require Presence in order for them to be successful. In its most basic instance, Presence identifies which knowledge workers are online and available for interaction on a PC or other device (think of your IM buddy list or gmail chat list). This capability is a must-have for collaborative interactions taking place in a workplace where collaborators may be in all different locations; for the remote or mobile worker, Presence is an online availability indicator for people, which allows them to connect and collaborate wherever they may be and on any device. Read more about how Presence adds context to Collaboration in our research note Enable Collaboration in Context With Presence.

Enterprise Social Networks: Knowledge at the Core

The big shift in enterprise social networks (ESNs) is the shift to social business applications, which has allowed ESNs to become more of a collaboration platform versus a separate, isolated tool. Often, this is where team members meet to quickly share and access information, especially since Content has become much easier to integrate with these apps – which is essential for workers on the go because it is a one-stop-shop for information.

In ESNs, the core organizing principle is still the group – a unit of organization that people can work in, and which common interests, activities or objectives serve to unify. Groups are still at the core of how people get things done because they allow people to do multiple types of things that all involve, engage and benefit the group. Learn about the latest, innovative approaches we have seen to groups in ESNs by reading our Globe for Social Software, 2015.

Use Case: Knowledge Sharing in Sales

In an age where customers and prospects are notoriously hard to reach and overloaded with information, the traditional tools for the workplace are not providing enough insight or intelligence to sales professionals in order to compete for reaching customers. This is where Sales Communications comes into play: an emerging business application, Sales Communications enables sales professionals to send content to contacts and track the interactions. Analytics are part of the key ingredients to effective sales communications offerings, as they allow the sales professional to know whether or not their attempts at communication and collaboration were effective. Read more in our Tech Spectrum for Sales Communications.